The Plague by Albert Camus (Highlights)

A Preview of Sorts

In the most ironic yet unfortunate of circumstances, I finished The Plague by Albert Camus on the plane back from Québec last night. It was a good yet exhausting flight day because of a long layover in Vancouver, and there were gems of joy: surprise lounge access, aisle to self, the bby running up and down the aisle who adored my reading light. I got to entertain him for a decent stretch to the exhausted “thank you” mouthed by the dad. Much to love.

Sometimes, however, you pass a child throwing up on the jet bridge as you deplane and know — 24 hours later — exactly what’s going to happen.

Which brings me to now. It’s also deserving of a happy list in contrast (more of a George Bailey effect than anything) although I am in physical hell at the moment. I already told my twin sister last week that I must have pissed off God (I’m religious, but think all interpretations of fate, morality, spirituality say more or less the same thing) somehow because I can't seem to catch much of a break lately.

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I don’t think any of the last year's conflicts have been related to my capability, just some bad timing. But I would like some better luck right about now so I can catch my breath. My mom calls being significantly ill "feeling puny" and that's very accurate.

As soon as the first wave of nausea hit in Waialua, I grabbed my fluffy blanket and pillow, crashed on the floor of the bathroom, and started throwing up, knowing I would not move for many hours. (I am writing this from said bathroom floor. I am also running a fever so forgive me for my incoherence.)

It’s okay. You can laugh. The reading list timing is funny. It could be a lot worse too. Last stomach bug I had (I think) was almost exactly a year ago in the Dominican Republic while on a work trip, and even that had its lucky moments. (That it wasn't the boat day, that it was at a chain resort with electrolytes and the like.) This time around, I was also grateful for a lot: that it wasn't a flying day, that it wasn't on the actual trip, that I live alone and don't have to worry about infecting anyone, that being on my own also means I don't have to be particularly dignified or ashamed about the fact that I cry whenever I have a fever and am leaning over every few moments to vom. I can just fall apart in peace (or in pieces.)

But being sick also tends to be when you're loneliest—or for me, at least most frustrated with the solitary way I'm wired. Luckily, it's also when I know most distinctively that I'm an "at least" person rather than an "if only" person—because I still cling to those little glimmers of meaning. How good everything will feel on the other side: that first ice water, that first real meal, that first day after being sick when you wake up refreshed and aware of all your stores of energy. And if The Plague is right, that's all that ever matters anyway, although I could do with the human tenderness that Camus elevates as being roughly the point. C'est la vie.

About the Book

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation, and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror.

An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947,
The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, as well as a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence. In this fresh yet careful translation, award-winning translator Laura Marris breathes new life into Albert Camus's ever-resonant tale. Restoring the restrained lyricism of the original French text, and liberating it from the archaisms and assumptions of the previous English translation, Marris grants English readers the closest access we have ever had to the meaning and searing beauty of The Plague.

I keep saying that I will share highlights of books I love so that they're not always only essays (and I need to "write short" more often) and I feel that particular strain of illness-induced fatigue you only ever notice burrowing behind your eyes combined with the frustration of not actually being able to do anything I want to or need to.

Some Highlights & Bullets to Tide You Over Until I'm Alive Again

• all-or-nothing belief (priest vs. doctor)
• what defines dignity in suffering
• solitary vs. communal agonies
• when the absence of someone is more of a presence
• gratitude in hindsight
• indifference being a primary driver behind actions
• Grand searching for the right words to the point of paralysis
• how misunderstood Rieux's detachment was (as an act of love)
• finitude and limited time creating meaning

“Frightened but not hopeless, people found the moment had not yet arrived when the plague would appear as the very form of their lives, when they would forget the existence they had once been able to lead. In short, they were waiting.”

“Rieux understood that he no longer needed to defend himself against pity. You get tired of pity when pity is useless.”

“He had always believed that persistence would eventually win out over everything else, and, from a certain angle, it was his job to be resourceful.”

“At the far end of this long period of separation, they could no longer imagine the intimacy that had once been theirs, nor could they imagine how they might have lived beside someone whom they could touch at any moment. In this regard, they had entered into the very rhythm of the plague, whose mediocrity made it even more effective. No one, living here, had grand feelings left. But everyone experienced monotonous ones.”

“By such weaknesses Rieux could assess his own fatigue. His sensibility was getting out of hand. Held back most of the time, hardened and dried out, it would occasionally collapse and abandon him to feelings that he could no longer control. His only defence was to resort to hardening himself and tightening the knot which had formed in him. He knew full well that this was the correct way to proceed.”

“'You have no heart,' someone once told him. But he did have one. He used it to bear the twenty hours a day in which he saw men dying who were made for life. He used it to start again day after day. For the time being, he had just enough heart for that. How could his heart have been big enough to give life?”

“But the most dangerous effect of the exhaustion that gradually overtook all those who carried on this struggle against the affliction was not this indifference to outside events and the feelings of others, but the neglect to which they gave way. They tended at this time to avoid any gesture that was not absolutely necessary or which seemed to them to tax their strength too much. As a result, these men came increasingly to neglect the very rules of hygiene that they had drawn up, to overlook some of the various disinfecting procedures that they ought to apply to themselves; they would sometimes hurry to see patients suffering from pulmonary plague without taking the necessary precautions, because they had been informed at the last moment that they would have to visit an infected house and had considered it too exhausting to go back to the proper place in order to take the necessary drops or injections. This is where the real danger lay, because it was the very struggle against the plague that made them more vulnerable to the plague; in short, they were gambling on chance and chance is on nobody's side.”

“'He appears to survive with the idea — which is not such a foolish one — that a man who is suffering from a great illness or a great fear is automatically relieved of all other illnesses or anxieties.'”

“'Nothing in the world is worth turning away from what you love. And yet I too, have turned away, without knowing why.'”

“'We can't heal and know at the same time. So let us heal as quickly as possible. That is the most urgent thing.'”

“Another curious thing was that he had started saying 'we' instead of 'you.'”

“'I don't have a taste, I don't think, for heroism and sainthood. What interests me is being human.' 'Yes, we're searching for the same thing, but I'm less ambitious.'”

“The patients seemed to help the doctor in some ways. Instead of abandoning themselves to exhaustion or madness early on, they seemed to have their best interests at heart. They asked endlessly for water, and they all wanted to be warm. Although the doctor's exhaustion was the same, he felt less alone in these moments.”

“Rieux wrote, for the first time in many months, but with the greatest difficulty. It was a language he had lost. The letter was sent. The reply was slow in coming.”

“Rieux knew what the old man was thinking at that moment as he wept, and he thought the same: that this world without love was like a dead world and that there always comes a time when one grows tired of prisons, work and courage, and years for the face of another human being and the wondering, affectionate heart.”

“Tarrou thought that the plague would have changed things and not changed them; naturally our fellow-citizens’ strongest desire was, and would be, to behave as if nothing had changed and for that reason nothing would be changed, in a sense. But — to look at it from another angle — one can’t forget everything, however great one’s wish to do so; the plague was bound to leave traces, anyhow, in people’s hearts.”

“Truthfully, his only task was to create opportunities for luck, which only stirred if it was provoked.”

“Was that why he had looked for sanctity and searched for peace in the service of others?”

“Others, in rarer cases, like Tarrou's perhaps, had desired a reunion with something they couldn't quite define, but which seemed like the only desirable good. And for lack of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.”

“Those people had, like Rieux himself, been casual about relying on time: they were separated forever. But others, like Rambert, whom the doctor had left that very morning, saying to him: "Be brave, now's the time to be right," had not hesitated to reunite with the person they thought they had lost. For some time, at least, they would be happy. They now knew that if there's one thing you can always desire and sometimes attain, it's human tenderness.”

“It is right for this chronicle to end with the man whose heart was ignorant, which is to say lonely.”

& more, later.